White supremacy or white supremacism is the racist belief that white people are superior to people of other races and therefore should be dominant over them. White supremacy has roots in scientific racism, and it often relies on pseudoscientific arguments. Like most similar movements such as neo-Nazism, white supremacists typically oppose members of other races as well as Jews.

In academic usage, particularly in usage which draws on critical race theory or Intersectionality, the term "white supremacy" can also refer to a political or socioeconomic system, in which white people enjoy a structural advantage (privilege) over other ethnic groups, on both a collective and individual level.

In some parts of the United States, many people who were considered non-white were disenfranchised, barred from government office, and prevented from holding most government jobs well into the second half of the 20th century. Professor Leland T. Saito of the University of Southern California writes: "Throughout the history of the United States, race has been used by whites for legitimizing and creating difference and social, economic and political exclusion."[9] The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites only.[10]

The denial of social and political freedom for minorities continued into the mid-20th century, resulting in the civil rights movement.[11] Sociologist Stephen Klineberg has stated that U.S. immigration laws prior to 1965 clearly declared "that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race".[12] The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional Northern European and Germanic groups, and significantly altered the demographic mix in the U.S as a result.[12] Many U.S. states banned interracial marriage through anti-miscegenation laws until 1967, when these laws were invalidated by the Supreme Court of the United States' decision in Loving v. Virginia. These mid-century gains had a major impact on white Americans' political views; segregation and white racial superiority, which had been publicly endorsed in the 1940s, became minority views within the white community by the mid-1970s, and continued to decline into 1990s polls to a single-digit percentage.[13][14] For sociologist Howard Winant, these shifts marked the end of "monolithic white supremacy" in the United States.[15]

After the mid-1960s, white supremacy remained an important ideology in the American far-right.[16] Howard Winant writes that, "On the far right the cornerstone of white identity is belief in an ineluctable, unalterable racialized difference between whites and nonwhites."[17] According to Kathleen Belew, a historian of race and racism in the United States, white militancy shifted after the Vietnam War from supporting the existing racial order to a more radical position—self-described as "white power" or "white nationalism"—committed to overthrowing the United States government and establishing a white homeland.[18][19] White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi organizations, the Christian Identity movement, and racist skinheads make up two of the three major strands of violent right-wing movements in the United States (the third is anti-government militia organizations).[20][21]

Some academics argue that outcomes from the 2016 United States Presidential Election reflect ongoing challenges with white supremacy. Psychologist Janet Helms suggested that the norming behaviors of social institutions of education, government, and healthcare are organized around the "birthright of...the power to control society's resources and determine the rules for [those resources]".[2] Educators, literary theorists, and other political experts have raised similar questions, connecting the scapegoating of disenfranchised populations to white superiority.[22][23]

In 1937, Winston Churchill told the Palestine Royal Commission: "I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." British historian Richard Toye, author of Churchill's Empire, said that "Churchill did think that white people were superior."[24]

Nazism promoted the idea of a superior Germanic people or Aryan race in Germany during the early 20th century. Notions of white supremacy and Aryan racial superiority were combined in the 19th century, with white supremacists maintaining the belief that white people were members of an Aryan "master race" which was superior to other races, particularly the Jews, who were described as the "Semitic race", Slavs, and Gypsies, which they associated with "cultural sterility". Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the ancien régime in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing, which he argued had destroyed the "purity" of the Nordic or Germanic race. Gobineau's theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany, emphasized the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan or Germanic peoples and Jewish culture.[25]

As the Nazi Party's chief racial theorist, Alfred Rosenberg oversaw the construction of a human racial "ladder" that justified Hitler's racial and ethnic policies. Rosenberg promoted the Nordic theory, which regarded Nordics as the "master race", superior to all others, including other Aryans (Indo-Europeans).[26] Rosenberg got the racial term Untermensch from the title of KlansmanLothrop Stoddard's 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man.[27] It was later adopted by the Nazis from that book's German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925).[28] Rosenberg was the leading Nazi who attributed the concept of the East-European "under man" to Stoddard.[29] An advocate of the U.S. immigration laws that favored Northern Europeans, Stoddard wrote primarily on the alleged dangers posed by "colored" peoples to white civilization, and wrote The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920. In establishing a restrictive entry system for Germany in 1925, Hitler wrote of his admiration for America's immigration laws: "The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races."[30]

German praise for America's institutional racism, previously found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930's, and Nazi lawyers were advocates of the use of American models.[31] Race-based U.S. citizenship and anti-miscegenation laws directly inspired the Nazi's two principal Nuremberg racial laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law.[31] In order to preserve the Aryan or Nordic race the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which forbade sexual relations and marriages between Germans and Jews, and later between Germans and Romani and Slavs. The Nazis used the Mendelian inheritance theory to argue that social traits were innate, claiming that there was a racial nature associated with certain general traits such as inventiveness or criminal behavior.[32]

Neo-Nazi organisations embracing white supremacist ideology are present in many countries of the world. In 2007, it was claimed that Russian neo-Nazis accounted for "half of the world's total".[40][41]

In June 2015, Democratic Representative John Conyers and his Republican colleague Ted Yoho offered bipartisan amendments to block the U.S. military training of Ukraine's Azov Battalion — called a “neo-Nazi paramilitary militia” by Conyers and Yoho.[42][43][44] Some members of the battalion are openly white supremacists.[45]

The term white supremacy is used in academic studies of racial power to denote a system of structural or societal racism which privileges white people over others, regardless of the presence or the absence of racial hatred. White racial advantages occur at both a collective and an individual level (ceteris paribus, i. e., when individuals are compared that do not relevantly differ except in ethnicity). Legal scholar Frances Lee Ansley explains this definition as follows:

By "white supremacy" I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.[46][47]

This and similar definitions have been adopted or proposed by Charles Mills,[48]bell hooks,[49]David Gillborn,[50] Jessie Daniels,[51] and Neely Fuller Jr,[52] and they are widely used in critical race theory and intersectional feminism. Some anti-racist educators, such as Betita Martinez and the Challenging White Supremacy workshop, also use the term in this way. The term expresses historic continuities between a pre–civil rights movement era of open white supremacism and the current racial power structure of the United States. It also expresses the visceral impact of structural racism through "provocative and brutal" language that characterizes racism as "nefarious, global, systemic, and constant".[53] Academic users of the term sometimes prefer it to racism because it allows for a distinction to be drawn between racist feelings and white racial advantage or privilege.[54][55][56]

The term's recent rise in popularity among leftist activists has been characterized by some as counterproductive. John McWhorter, a specialist in language and race relations, has described its use as straying from its commonly accepted meaning to encompass less extreme issues, thereby cheapening the term and potentially derailing productive discussion.[57][58][59] Political columnist Kevin Drum attributes the term's growing popularity to frequent use by Ta-Nehisi Coates, describing it as a "terrible fad" which fails to convey nuance. He claims that the term should be reserved for those who are trying to promote the idea that whites are inherently superior to blacks and not used to characterize less blatantly racist beliefs or actions.[60][61] The use of the academic definition of white supremacy has been criticized by Conor Friedersdorf for the confusion it creates for the general public inasmuch as it differs from the more common dictionary definition; he argues that it is likely to alienate those it hopes to convince.[61]

Supporters of Nordicism consider the "Nordic peoples" to be a superior race.[62] By the early 19th century, white supremacy was attached to emerging theories of racial hierarchy. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer attributed cultural primacy to the white race:

The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmans, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want and misery, which in their many forms were brought about by the climate.[63]

The eugenicistMadison Grant argued in his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, that the Nordic race had been responsible for most of humanity's great achievements, and that admixture was "race suicide".[64] In this book, Europeans who are not of Germanic origin but have Nordic characteristics such as blonde/red hair and blue/green/gray eyes, were considered to be a Nordic admixture and suitable for Aryanization.[65]

Christian Identity is another movement closely tied to white supremacy. Some white supremacists identify themselves as Odinists, although many Odinists reject white supremacy. Some white supremacist groups, such as the South AfricanBoeremag, conflate elements of Christianity and Odinism. Creativity (formerly known as "The World Church of the Creator") is atheistic and it denounces Christianity and other theistic religions.[72][73] Aside from this, its ideology is similar to that of many Christian Identity groups because it believes in the antisemitic conspiracy theory that there is a "Jewish conspiracy" in control of governments, the banking industry and the media. Matthew F. Hale, founder of the World Church of the Creator, has published articles stating that all races other than white are "mud races", which is what the group's religion teaches.[66]

White supremacist recruitment activities are primarily conducted at a grassroots level as well as on the Internet. Widespread access to the Internet has led to a dramatic increase in white supremacist websites.[77] The Internet provides a venue to openly express white supremacist ideas at little social cost, because people who post the information are able to remain anonymous.

^Flint, Colin (2004). Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Discrimination and Intolerance in the U.S.A. Routledge. p. 53. ISBN0-415-93586-5. Although white racist activists must adopt a political identity of whiteness, the flimsy definition of whiteness in modern culture poses special challenges for them. In both mainstream and white supremacist discourse, to be white is to be distinct from those marked as non-white, yet the placement of the distinguishing line has varied significantly in different times and places.

^A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union: "We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable. That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states."

^Schuman, Howard; Steeh, Charlotte; Bobo, Lawrence; Krysan, Maria (1997). Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations. Harvard University Press. pp. 103ff. ISBN978-0-674-74568-1. The questions deal with most of the major racial issues that became focal in the middle of the twentieth ecntury: integration of public accommodations, school integration, residential integration, and job discrimiantion [and] racial intermarriage and willingness to vote for a black presidential candidate. … The trends that occur for most of the principle items are quite similar and can be illustrated …using attitudes toward school integration as an example. The figure shows that there ha been a massive and continuing movement of the American public from overwhelming acceptance of the principle of segregated schooling in the early 1940s toward acceptance of the principle of integrated schooling. … by 1985, more than nine out of ten chose the pro-integration response.

^Healey, Joseph F.; O'Brien, Eileen (2007-05-08). Race, Ethnicity, and Gender: Selected Readings. Pine Forge Press. ISBN978-1-4129-4107-5. In 1942 only 42 percent of a national sample of whites reported that they believed blacks to be equal to whites in innate intelligence; since the late 1950s, however, around 80 percent of white Americans have rejected the idea of inherent black inferiority.

^Berlet, Chip; Lyons, Matthew N. (2018-03-08). Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. Guilford Publications. ISBN978-1-4625-3760-0. While the New Right and Christian Right flourished in the 1970s and 1980s, the Far Right also rebounded… The Far Right—encompassing Ku Klux Klan, neonazi, and related organizations—attracted a much smaller following than the New Right, but its influence reverberated in its encouragement of widespread attacks against members of oppressed groups and in broad-based scapegoating campaigns

^Belew, Kathleen (2018). Bring the war home: The white power movement and paramilitary America. ISBN978-0-674-28607-8. The white power movement that emerged from the Vietnam era shared some common attributes with earlier racist movements in the United States, but it was no mere echo. Unlike previous iterations of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist vigilantism, the white power movement did not claim to serve the state. Instead, white power made the state its target, declaring war against the federal government in 1983.

^Though Rosenberg does not use the word "master race". He uses the word "Herrenvolk" (i. e., ruling people) twice in his book The Myth, first referring to the Amorites (saying that Sayce described them as fair skinned and blue eyed) and secondly quoting Victor Wallace Germains' description of the English in "The Truth about Kitchener". ("The Myth of the Twentieth Century") - Pages 26, 660 - 1930

^"Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation?" hooks, bell (2009-02-04). Black Looks: Race and Representation. Turnaround Publisher Services Limited. p. 12. ISBN978-1-873262-02-3.

^Grillo and Wildman cite hooks to argue for the term racism/white supremacy: "hooks writes that liberal whites do not see themselves as either prejudiced or interested in domination through coercion, and they do not acknowledge the ways in which they contribute to and benefit from the system of white privilege." Grillo, Trina; Stephanie M. Wildman (1997-06-29). "The implications of making comparisons between racism and sexism (or other isms)". In Richard Delgado; Jean Stefancic. Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror. Temple University Press. p. 620. ISBN978-1-56639-532-8.